In the distant future the starship Intrepid seeks out new worlds and boldly goes where no man has gone before. However, as newly assigned Ensign Andrew Dahl soon discovers, it is the low-ranking crew members that die more often aboard the Intrepid than brain cells on a Friday night pub crawl, while the senior officers always survive without a scratch.
If you have ever watched an episode or two of Star Trek you’ll know that it's always the crew member with a redshirt, that dies when the crew beams down to a planet or any other location that's not on the bridge of the ship. Why is that? That's the question Redshirts poses to the reader.
Scalzi took what could be a one-joke premise from Star Trek about disposable extras with a short shelf life, and he turned that concept into a funny and interesting examination on the nature of fiction and free will. I don’t want to spoil much about the plot because the twists and turns are part of the fun and I enjoyed how the book went off in a couple of surprising directions. I did find Scalzi’s writing style a bit odd. It seems to skip almost any kind of descriptive writing to focus almost exclusively on dialogue or exposition in the interest of rushing through the main story.
It felt more like I was reading a script for a TV show than a book and I found it rather annoying that there isn’t much description about what the ship or the characters look like. I would just imagine generic looking Star Trek characters to give the world some more depth. While I was completely into the story of the crew fighting against their fate, a few more details about what they looked like would have been welcome.
Red Shirts is compulsively readable, but it feels a bit thin. The codex at the end of the book is more enjoyable than the book as it helps to fill in the remaining plot points left from the main story. This book also clearly shows that Scalzi can be a great writer when he is not feeling lazy.
Red Shirts receives 2 and half accidently-killed-by-a-freak-accident waffles.
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